Motor Mission #18

The Motomish is entering it’s twilight stage. The days are getting shorter, the roads are getting better, the cars are moving faster. With only a month of motorbiking left but still a bunch of countries to circumnavigate it was going to be a busy one.

Austria
From Italy I headed north over the Dolomite Ranges to Austria. It’s kind of become a habit to record the first thing a person says to me in each country. Stopping in Innsbruck in front of a shop I was happy to see a shopkeeper coming out to say hello. Unfortunately the first thing this Austran said to me was, “Please move your motorbike, I like to keep that parking space free for my customers.”

Thinking Austria didn’t look so flash I headed out of town. On the way I stopped to grab a bite and on entering a little cafe was met with stares from a couple at a table. They turned out to be very friendly and convinced me to stay in Innsbruck for the night. So, with my opinion of Austria on the rise, I decided to hang out.

Germany
As the good Lord would have it, I made it into Munich just in time for church on Sunday. After hours of attempted navigation I knew I had to be getting close to the Munich International Church. I took a punt and asked a car I was next to at the lights. ‘‘Wo ist Mozart straÃŸe’ (that german class I took at Uni was coming back to help), “What are you looking for?” the driver inquired in really good English.

“Er - there’s an English church there”

“Oh yeah, we’re going there too, follow us.”

Sweet…

I arrived just as the church was starting and plonked myself down. They were asking if there were any visitors so I dutifully put my hand up and the microphone was thrust in front of my face.

“Ummm.. hi! I’ve come here from Australia on motorbike. I heard about you guys from a family in Jordan.”

Incredulous stares.

I was in for some stiff competition though. I had a rival for most hard-up traveller, though. There was a fellow traveller from America who was spending two months travelling in Europe. He confesed to me he’d spent the last two night sleeping at the train station in an unused carriage.

The Munich International Church is pastored by a pioneering American bloke, Steve. He came to Germany to serve in this already established church as he could see there were a large number of expatriates without a church to call home, and now along with them there are many German families who call this church home too. After church many people go down to the local beer garden for a drink and a chat.
Having a beer seems to be the German version of a cuppa after the service.

I managed to convince Steve’s wife that I was suitably destitute enough to require them to take me home with them. She did ask me if I was a serial killer and my answer in the negative seemed to satisfy her. Steve didn’t need too much convincing and that way I was able to go with him for the 6:00am Men’s Bible Study in the morning (we had to get up at 4am!! :oP)

France
I buzzed out of Germany toward France, stopping one night to stay with a new friend I’d met who had a beautiful house in a village outside of Munich which he shared with his boyfriend, one of them being Catholic and the other proclaiming to be Protestant. It all made for some interesting conversation.

Heading to France, I ended up making a wrong turn and instead landed in Switzerland. A few more turns and hey presto it was France for real! My next destination was the Pyrennees Mountains in the south of the country, so I wended my way down via a few chateaus and cheese factories, a baguette or two semi-permanently poking from the side of the motorbike.

In a small village called Panassac at the foot of the Pyrenees is a Christian convention centre which is the sight of not just conferences but a steady stream of Christain televsion programs. The masterminds behind this ministry are Andre and Sergine (as French as wine and
cheese). The guy I’d come to see, though, was a bloke called Daniel who at an age not much over 40 had already devoted nearly 25 years to serving the Lord.

What do you do when you are young and single and want to serve the Lord? Everything. Daniel is like the missionary equivalent of hire-a-hubby. If your a missionary and are going away on furlough for 6 months, then call Daniel and he’ll come and fill in for you. He was just completing a six month stint editing television programs (along with fixing all sorts of stuff) and was about to leave for Indonesia for 6 months working in a hospital where one of his first jobs would be unblocking the hospitals water supply pipe. Not glamorous but obviously extremely useful. He’d also spent some time in the hospital I was at in Jordan. That’s where I had heard about him. One of his greatest acheivements there was cleaning out and fixing the septic tank that was threatening to collapse (something he discovered in his cleaning). So he doesn’t pick jobs becasue they are glamourous but becasue the Lord guides him to places where he is most useful. Ladies, this man is available and hot property!! for more info on him check out [url=http://www.danielhuisman.com]http://www.danielhuisman.com[/url].

Daniel must have alerted the convention centre owners about my arrival because there was a list of jobs awaiting me when I arrived. Nice to be useful. So I spent a week in the French countryside painting houses dotted around the centre to the adoration of older French ladies, who had been waiting patiently for someone to come and help them. They told me they had been praying for someone to come, I apologised for not coming sooner, claiming India is a lot bigger than it looks.

The French Riviera
After a week it was time to go, promising that I would return again in the future. I headed down into Spain then off along the south coast of France, on the way I stopped by at the house of some people I’d heard about from a friend in India, a family that had a mission to AIDS sufferers in a village near Avignon. Now the south soast of France seems like an unusual place to have an AIDS mission but it is the area that has seen a lot of imigration from North Africa. This family from the UK didn’t come here specifically to set up that mission but after arriving here saw a need and rose to meet it.

The French Riviera was packed with beaches and holiday-makers. The motorbike was a bit out of place amongst the packs of Germans riding big BMWs and the thousands of camper-cars which seem to be the most popular form of holiday transport if you’re from the Netherlands. Even though the bike looked a bit odd, I’d get a lot of comments like “So you’re on a vacation tour of Europe hey?” to which I would nonchalently reply,